The broker said: Admiral's business model is highly geared to growth yet the first half demonstrated how the company is coming under increasing pressure from softer UK insurance pricing, regulatory change and most importantly in our view, a decision to rein in volume growth.
In the European Union (EU), cost-containment measures include external and internal reference pricing, regulatory steering of market access, public tendering, price freezes, cuts and discounts, regulation of profit margins for pharmacists and wholesalers, patient cost-sharing, guidelines for and monitoring of prescribing behaviours, and generic substitution [ 4, 5].
Unlike prices, regulatory policy requires articulated justifications and objective standards.
Varying reasons lay behind the results, including falling oil prices, regulatory issues and a slowdown in China, although some big businesses are still performing well, notably Apple, the biggest of them all.
And it casts a spotlight on the problems drug companies now face: a drought of big drug breakthroughs and research discoveries; pressure from insurers and the government to hold down prices; regulatory vigilance and government investigations; and thousands of layoffs in research and development.
Karlin Granadillo, superintendent of the price regulatory agency known as Sundecop, said in a statement over state-owned media that the National Guard would remain at the Manpa plant in La Hamaca, Aragua state, while the "temporary occupation" is carried out.
These concerns underscore the need for a range of complementary non-price regulatory and educational measures to outlaw the promotion of tobacco products and to educate smokers about the risks of smoking and medicinal aids and behavioural tips to improve success rates in quitting.
For all their environmental attraction, IGCC and other clean-coal technologies cannot compete economically with natural-gas-fired plants under current pricing and regulatory conditions.
As the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal noted, in its decision on prices from July 2013, the price increase was "substantially lower than those in the past years … due to much lower changes to network costs in this year, following four years of large network price increases".
We also explore the effects of different pricing and regulatory options of vertical control on product quality and the distribution of the total supply-chain profit.
The reasons for this include — among others — a lackluster IPO market, pricing and regulatory pressures, which led to constriction in venture capital and more cautious investment strategies in the health market.
